In a typical cloud data center environment, there is a large collection of interconnected servers that provide computing and/or storage capacity to run various applications. For example, a data center may comprise a facility that hosts applications and services for subscribers, i.e., customers of data center. The data center may, for example, host infrastructure equipment, such as networking and storage systems, redundant power supplies, and environmental controls. In a typical data center, clusters of storage systems and application servers are interconnected via high-speed switch fabric provided by one or more tiers of physical and/or virtual network switches and routers. More sophisticated data centers provide infrastructure spread throughout the world with subscriber support equipment located in various physical hosting facilities.
In a virtualized environment, multiple virtual machines (VMs) running on, for instance, a server may share a single physical interface device (IFD). The host may create multiple virtual interfaces and may map the virtual interfaces to the physical IFD using, for instance, a virtual bridge. The virtual bridge forwards ingress/egress traffic from virtual interface devices (virtual IFDs) to and from the physical IFDs, thus enabling the VMs to communicate with the outside world.